"We present a design and open source implementation for a service oriented e-learning system, which utilizes external services for supporting a wide range of learning content and also offers a REST API for external clients to fetch information stored in the system."
Karavirta, V. & Ihantola, P. & Koskinen, T. (2013) Service-Oriented Approach to Improve Interoperability of E-Learning Systems http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICALT.2013.105
The system has since been developed by various contributors at Aalto University, Finland.
A+ is a Django 1.7+ and Python 3.4+ application which has been run in production using Postgresql database, Apache 2 and uwsgi. See doc/DEPLOYMENT.md for further deployment instructions. Consider using virtualenv and pip3 install -r requirements.txt. Create local_settings.py and override necessary Django settings from a-plus/settings.py. At least DEBUG, SECRET_KEY and DATABASES must be set in case of deployment. The server process needs write access to the media directory.
See doc/README.md on how to create and run a test environment for development. The doc/GRADERS.md describes grader service protocols and doc/example_grader.py is a minimal sample for implementing different kind of exercise graders. A separate grading framework application supporting the A+ protocol exists at https://github.com/Aalto-LeTech/mooc-grader
The selenium_test/ offers an integration test suite using the Selenium Firefox driver.
- a-plus/ : Django main settings
- userprofile/ : User information and authentication
- django_shibboleth/ : Handles users for Apache Shibboleth request headers
- course/ : The course instances, modules and chapters
- exercise/ : Exercises and submissions to them
- deviations/ : Student deviations to submission rules
- notification/ : User messaging framework
- edit_course/ : The course editing for teachers
- inheritance/ : Utilities for model class hierarchy
- external_services/ : Linking to external services, optionally LTI authenticated
- apps/ : Provides plugins that can integrate additional content to course instances
- api/ : An HTTP service API for accessing A+ data
- redirect_old_urls/ : Redirections from the most important old URL targets
- lib/ : General library code
- templates/ : General site templates
- assets/ : Static web server assets e.g. javascript, styles and images
- media/ : User uploaded files